The CALM Act finally puts the muzzle on loud TV commercials

Law promises to shut up that Five Hour Energy guy.

Imagine this scenario: you're Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson and you're settling in to watch some Golden Girlsreruns. Maybe, like Lee, you've cracked open a bag of habanero pork rinds and a can of Keystone Light. Yes, you think to yourself, this will be the best Friday night ever!

And then the commercials come on. Maybe it's one of those annoying Five Hour Energy spots or Geico's cloying ad campaign du jour, but in any case it's loud—much louder than the lovable antics of Blanche and the rest of the wacky widows in Miami.

As of today, that hypothetical scenario will be a thing of the past. CNN reports that the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, which originally passed at the end of 2010, finally goes into effect today. The law grants the FCC the authority to regulate the volume of commercials, which according to CALM must now be "the same average volume" as the programs that they interrupt.

Not all TV stations will be subjected to the new rules. Small TV stations and cable providers without the means to enforce the new regulations can request a one-year waiver to buy themselves additional time, and that waiver can be renewed for one additional year at the discretion of the FCC.

As laid out on the FCC's website, the Commission will rely primarily on consumer complaints to gauge compliance with the new guidelines. The next time a loud Skittles ad interrupts your Two and a Half Men viewing experience, go to the FCC's complaints page and choose "Broadcast (TV and Radio), Cable, and Satellite Issues," which now has a subcategory allowing for complaints about loud commercials.

Imagine this scenario: you're Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson and you're settling in to watch some Golden Girls reruns ... As of today, that hypothetical scenario will be a thing of the past ... The FCC ...

The FCC has finally acted to improve the quality of television programming!

...Too bad for the cable companies I and growing group of people do not pay to watch commercials. Cable for the lose, Netflix FTW.

I totally second that. I haven't watched anything but Netflix or some other web offering in quite some time. I have my tv in our basement where I can be totally content.

On the occasions I venture upstairs and can see and hear my wife and children watching their Dish Network those loud commercials drive me bonkers; not to mention that totally inane sit coms I've managedto see a few minutes of while grabbing something from the fridge.

It's a good thing Billy Mays is already dead, or else this would put him out of a job.

Nah, he would have just resorted to flailing about and making huge gestures with his arms and having Vince the Sham-wow guy look even more creepy in the back ground holding his slap-nuts device doing something inane with it all the while.

...Too bad for the cable companies I and growing group of people do not pay to watch commercials. Cable for the lose, Netflix FTW.

I totally second that. I haven't watched anything but Netflix or some other web offering in quite some time. I have my tv in our basement where I can be totally content.

On the occasions I venture upstairs and can see and hear my wife and children watching their Dish Network those loud commercials drive me bonkers; not to mention that totally inane sit coms I've managedto see a few minutes of while grabbing something from the fridge.

Just going cable-free doesn't totally insulate you, though - I was watching the Charlie Brown Christmas Special with my kids via the (ad-supported) ABC iOS app the other day, and they're boosting the ad volume in their app too. Somehow it was even more annoying than on regular TV.

As a broadcaster let me tell you this was a fun one to be compliant with as most of the vendors of the equipment to make us compliant only finalized the software in the last week or two. There are a couple ways to be compliant, one way is pretty much impossible but it looks great on paper. The second involves using ALC hardware combined with real time logging and alerts if you are out of bounds. That is really the only way to cover yourself with the new regs. $18k later and working out the kinks in not really finalized software and we are now compliant. What does the viewer see at home? Very little difference if the station was actually doing their job when dubbing in commercials, part of which is adjusting the volume so its is at a reasonable and consistent level. Cable channels being the worst offenders.

As someone that works in the field, it is a big step forward for keeping some kind of sanity in sound-for-TV. Otherwise, a loudness war would develop in TV audio, bringing the same results it had on music.

Wow - its about time! I remember watching a movie (Batman Begins specifically, and I like to watch movies like that loud) then having to run for my remote when commercials started as the loudness was intolerable. I actually used an Android app that measures decibel level and though I don't remember exact numbers the commercials were twice as loud as the movie.

This has been the law in the Netherlands for a while. Doesn't stop the networks to pull the same stuff on their online on-demand streaming services though. Makes you feel like they are children incapable of reasoning that what's not allowed on one medium, mostly likely will not be allowed on the other. But capitalism being what it is it will require a rewording of the law to explicitly state that it is ALSO not allowed over there... kinda sad actually.

Who cares about TV. How about we include Youtube in this so the Axe commercial doesn't blow my speakers out.

It kills me that the ads on some websites are insanely loud, yet I can't get the actual content turned up enough to actually hear it (ESPN.com is the worst). It's like they've muted their content to feature the ads.

1) The concept of paying for premium TV with commercials. Either make it free and support it with advertising or charge money and have no ads. It's the same model that Spotify and mobile apps often use.

2) Keystone. Seriously, all you're doing is reinforcing the stereotype that Americans have poor taste in beer. This can only conclude in merciless ridicule until such a time you try a beer that isn't watery piss.

Haven't there actually been regs, albeit loosely if ever enforced ones, on this for ages and ages in the US? I have no citations, but I think that "they" have always been gaming the system, to an extent. They can play games with metrics - when and how to measure/report the volume. They can play games with stereo v. mono to achieve technical compliance that does not "sound" compliant to the human ear. They can play games with dynamic range. That sort of thing. Again, no references or citations - just the stuff that we think we hear, and that others in our circles feel the same way about.

Per windnwar's post, above (cool info, thanks, and thanks for aiming for compliance!), it sounds like compliance isn't as easy as some may think. But still, some of us may tend to blame the players anyway, thinking - if not knowing and proving - that at least a few of them are bums and are somehow gaming or cheating the system. Do the new regs truly prevent that?

I can't imagine how this falls under "must have" rather than "nice to have." And we really shouldn't be spending money on the latter.

To be fair, we are not a utilitarian society, to only concentrate on absolute necessities. The government is not a one-track mind, and it is quiet possible to handle things of major and minor importance simultaneously. With major issues in congressional gridlock, I'll take the minor stuff. If we stop spending money on small things that make our lives comfortable (and this law is definitely going in that direction) we will still not be any closer to solving our major issues.

2) Keystone. Seriously, all you're doing is reinforcing the stereotype that Americans have poor taste in beer. This can only conclude in merciless ridicule until such a time you try a beer that isn't watery piss.

Really? TV companies have had two years, and can have up to another two years to put an $80 compressor in place in their output stream? FAIL.

There are no compressors available for $80 that would ensure compliance. Let's not be fatuous.

Programs are delivered with audio streams at varying levels. These are normalized in the control room, but even if the average volumes of the show and the commercial are the same, a program that ends quietly will trigger expansion, and then a commercial that begins loudly will blare. Viewers enjoying a program will turn it up because they're interested in the show, and then get blasted out of their seats because their volume is halfway up the scale. If the -show- had Billy Mays in it, the TV would have been turned down in the first place. But no.

So to handle all this, software must monitor everything in real time and either make continuous adjustments ($$$$) or simply alert the operator ($$$) that the signal is out of range. A simple compressor-expander-limiter won't do the job. In fact, these will have been installed already — you want /all/ of your broadcast material going out at a nice fat level, for the sake of your transmitter's efficiency, so you already have a device riding the levels.

What you need is an omniscient operator who can tell when the viewers are going to complain because their volume is way up and suddenly a commercial is too loud. I don't know why congress didn't just spit it out and demand that TV stations send someone personally to everyone's house to handle the remote control.

Excellent news! Now if somebody will convince the movie producers to turn up the volume on whispering actors a little. For me, watching movies is a constant exercise in turning the volume up so I can hear actors that seem to whisper in one movie more than I do in an entire decade, and then turning the volume back down to avoid being blasted out of my seat when the action gets going.

Transmitter efficiency does not compute if you're transmitting digital streams. That's the point of CALM, BS1770 and R128: analog does not apply anymore, let's try to use digital sound properly instead of squashing everything up to 0dBFS.

And with BS1770 and R128 specs, programs can be delivered with varying audio levels but with the SAME loudness level - and that's what counts.

The law grants the FCC the authority to regulate the volume of commercials, which according to CALM must now be "the same average volume" as the programs that they interrupt.

"same average volume"... so half the commercial can be very loud if the other half is very quiet?

You are probably on to something there. Some commercials already have that - especially radio, but some TV spots too, where they have some speedy talker read the "legal disclaimer" that tells you that the product doesn't actually do any of the things you saw or heard in the ad. They do this very quietly and very fast. So the rest of the ad probably can be pretty loud. It doesn't matter to me. That is what the fast forward button on my TiVo is for. Netflix too.

Andrew Cunningham / Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue.